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By way of an update - we have had another batch of BlackIce boards manufactured in China - and these are now on general sale priced $52.50 plus $7 shipping. Contact me ken dot boak at gmail dot com for details.

In addition, one of our forum members, Dave Banks, has got an implementation of the 1980s Acron Atom running on the BlackIce hardware - using a soft core 6502 and the internal block RAM available in the FPGA. The FPGA also provides a VGA output to a screen and interfaces to a PS/2 keyboard. More details on the forum https://forum.mystorm.uk/t/acorn-atom-implementation-for-mystorm-blackice/228/3

Well, I already spent the time and effort to install it all in a VM so I'm currently all set - thanks ;-)

But imagine the combined wasted time of 10 000 people doing this instead of one knowledgeable guy just every now and then creating a proper VM containing a linux guest with the toolset and some utilities setup that can be run in any host os.

I on a mac host, but I'm using win7 guests for my ARM/Verifone development, and Linux guests for backend development in golang. There's really no major problems with OS'es when running in a virtual environment. That's the beauty with VMs - the host OS and the guest OS is completely decoupled.

Hi. I have a question after watching the video - you say that the ARM has a 5Ms/s ADC on it - is it going to be possible to move (i.e. stream) that amount of data from the ADC to the FPGA continuously? I mainly do signal processing, so that would have a lot of potential opportunities. Thanks.

I can only apologise for the delay - but there has been a lot happening behind the scenes.

UK

We had 50 boards made in July - these have all gone out to early birds.

We debuted the board at the Open Source Hardware Camp - OSHCamp in early September - where the first 25 "freebie" boards were used to run a weekend workshop on the IceStorm toolchain and verilog programming

We have presented the board at the Open Source Hardware Users Group in London in mid-October.

There has been an update to the pcb - and we are just building up pcb the sample this weekend (Oct 29/30). If the pcb is good we will be making a batch off 250 of these in Shenzhen in 2 weeks time, and they will be in the US/UK/EU by early December - in time for the Christmas holiday period. If initial sales are good - there will be a follow-up of 250 pieces in January.

The first boards have been released as an SDK and details of this are now on the myStorm.uk website.

Europe

In early October we attended the open RISC conference ORconf in Bologna, Italy - and were well received. All of the sample SDKs we took with us were snapped up.

A friend in Germany has got a Forth soft core cpu running in the FPGA, and there is progress on several other fronts both in UK, EU and USA.

James Bowman's J1a Forth core runs on a 1K myStorm - and James and I are working to make full use of the available resources of the 4K (actually 8K) myStorm FPGA and ARM Resources

USA

I will be visiting Northern California between 17th November and 28th November, to speak to various organisations, potential customers and distributors. I will be attending makerspaces in the Bay Area.